ATR/92:1
From Church-Shaped Mission
to Mission-Shaped Church1
Christopher Duraisingh*
Though the missional calling of the church is acknowledged by all,
often mission remains just a function among many other more
pressing tasks in congregations. This paper tentatively explores the
ecclesiological and theological re-visioning necessary for a move
from “church-shaped” missions to a “mission-shaped” church. After identifying some clues to missional thinking from the work of
Asian theologians, the essay argues that the classical term concursus Dei is far more effective than the more recent missio Dei for
such a transformation into missional congregations. Developing
the notion of concursus Dei as the continuous accompaniment of
God in creation or the “God-movement” in judgment and grace, it
then briefly turns to a consideration of the marks of leadership for
such a mission-shaped church that is keeping in step with God’s
already up-and-running movement in creation.
“There is no participation in Christ without
participation in His mission to the world.”
—Wilhelm Richebacher 2
The Challenge
The central affirmation that the very being of the church is
* Christopher Duraisingh is Otis Charles Visiting Professor in Applied Theology
and faculty emeritus at the Episcopal Divinity School, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
He has served as General Secretary of the Council for World Mission (London); Director of the Commission on World Mission and Evangelism of the World Council of
Churches (Geneva) and its Executive Secretary for Gospel and Cultures; and Editor
of the International Review of Mission.
1 The title is influenced by recent discussions on the mission-shaped church in the
Church of England. See the report of a working group of the Church of England’s
Mission and Public Affairs Council, Mission-Shaped Church: Church Planting and
Fresh Expressions of Church in a Changing Context (London: Church House Publishing, 2004).
2 From the closing statement of the meeting of the International Missionary
Council, Willingen, 1952; cited from the official report in Wilhelm Richebacher,
“Missio Dei: The Basis of Mission Theology or a Wrong Path?,” International Review
of Mission 92, no. 367 (October 2003): 589.
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constituted in and through its participation in God’s mission in the
world is at the heart of Christian faith. That the church is not an end
in itself and mission is not an optional extra to its being was brought
home to the Episcopal Church, in no uncertain terms, at its 76th General Convention in July 2009. From the reports about the addresses of
the Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori to conversations
among the youth participants, it would appear that “mission was the
center stage.” The following words from the opening address of the
Presiding Bishop at the very beginning of the convention are illustrative of that fact:
How do we keep the main thing the main thing? How will we insist . . . that God’s mission is our reason for existence . . . ? The
structures of this church are resources for God’s mission, but they
are not God’s mission in themselves. . . . Jesus’ passion was and is
for God’s dream of a reconciled creation. We’re meant to be partners in building that reality, throughout all of creation.3
Or again from Presiding Bishop Jefferts Schori’s sermon at the Opening Eucharist:
The heart of this church will slowly turn to stone if we think our
primary mission work is to those already in the pews inside our
beautiful churches, or to those at other altars. We are in cardiac
crisis if we think we can close the doors, swing our incense and
sing our hymns, and all will be right with the world. The heart of
this body is mission. . . . Every time we gather, the Spirit offers a
pacemaker jolt to tweak the rhythm of this heart. The challenge is
whether or not . . . the muscle will respond with a strengthened
beat, sending more life out into the world. . . . Can you hear the
heartbeat? Mission, Mission, Mission. . . .4
These words not only issue a clarion challenge, they also raise the
question whether, in reality, the “heartbeat” of “Mission, Mission, Mission” is heard among the local worshiping communities of the church.
3 The entire text of the Opening Address at General Convention 2009, given July
7, 2009 by Katharine Jefferts Schori, may be found at www.episcopalchurch.org/
78703_112035_ENG_HTM.htm.
4 The entire text of Katharine Jefferts Schori’s sermon at the Opening Eucharist,
preached on July 8, 2009, may be found at www.episcopalchurch.org/78703_112074_
ENG_HTM.htm.
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For we have a nagging sense that there is indeed a “cardiac crisis” at the
local level in many places. Continuing to use her metaphor, the question of how we can allow the Spirit, at every level of the church, Episcopal and others, to “offer a pacemaker jolt to tweak the rhythm of
this heart” is as urgent as ever. What sort of leadership and resources
would such a quickening process need? Or more disturbingly, to push
the metaphor a little further, one even wonders whether mission is the
heart of many a local congregation. As the Pastoral Letter from Lambeth 1988 puts it, “In many parts of the Church, Anglicans have emphasized the pastoral model of ministry at the expense of mission. We
believe that the Holy Spirit is now leading us to become a movement
for mission.”5 The Lambeth bishops, along with leaders of many other
traditions and the ecumenical movement, have reiterated the need for
a dynamic missional emphasis that propels the churches to go beyond
serving only the felt needs for nurture and care.
The Church-Shaped Mission
The pressures of keeping up with the inner needs of the church
take almost the entire energy and time of the ministerial leadership.
But a congregation—primarily organized around developing and
maintaining its own inner life—becoming a movement for mission is
simply not possible unless there comes about a radical shift from the
“cultures of membership to cultures of discipleship.”6 The culture of
discipleship is fundamentally a way of being, a lifestyle. Correspondingly, a call to mission is primarily a call to a posture of being “turned
inside out.” It is a call to a fundamental reorientation of the church to
be a “church inside out.”7
It is not easy to break out of the “culture of membership” which
consumes much of the energy and attention of its ministerial and lay
leadership in meeting the needs of its members. The problem is not
new; the church has been defined, over the centuries, primarily in
terms of its inner life as the place where the Word is truly preached, the
sacraments duly administered, and the people rightly governed. No
5 Quoted in Robert Warren, Building Missionary Congregations (London:
Church House Publishing, 1995), 3.
6 Fred Hiltz, “Go to the World! Go Struggle, Bless, and Pray: Bishops, Theological Schools, and Mission,” Anglican Theological Review 90, no. 2 (Spring 2008): 307.
Italics mine for emphasis.
7 Title of a book by Johannes Hoekendijk (Philadelphia, Pa.: Westminster, 1966).
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wonder that mission is seen as just “one more thing to do” among others and therefore is often conveniently left to be carried out in proxy by
a few enthusiasts in the congregation or to some diocesan or denominational body. Unless the inward-looking definition is challenged, the
ecclesiology behind it is reframed, and the equipping processes of its
leadership are revisioned, a “mission-shaped” church whose very being is constituted in and for mission is simply unthinkable. It is this
concern, I understand, that lies behind the Winter 2010 issue of the
Anglican Theological Review.
Perhaps a matter of greater concern is that even in churches
which seem to be very active in several local or global “missions” or
projects, mission appears to be an optional “extra” carried through by
a few, with little or no impact upon the being of the whole congregation and its worship, nurture, or fellowship. Three aspects of mission
that is defined and shaped by a few enthusiasts may be observed, each
of which needs to be subverted if our churches are to be transformed
into missional communities. These observations also provide the rationale for moving from church-shaped mission to being a missionshaped church.
First, in many congregations, mission is understood primarily in
“functional” terms, that is, in terms of a number of activities or “missions” to be carried out (note the use of the word in the plural). It is
not very different from the use of the term in various “mission statements” by all sorts of agencies and corporations. But such an understanding does not reflect the fundamental missionary nature and being of the church; for, as Emil Brunner stated, “The church exists by
mission as fire exists by burning” (note the word by and not for, since
the latter reduces mission to only a function). How important it is to
be reminded that mission cannot be reduced purely to strategies and
activities for the success of an institution. How pertinent too it is to
recover the import of the provocative expression of the early sixties
that mission is not a function of the church, but rather, the church is
a function in the already up-and-running mission of God in the world.
My observation is that some interpretations of Matthew 28:19, known
as the Great Commission, have led to a distortion of the church’s understanding of “sent-ness,” from characterizing the very essence and
the constitutive dynamic of the church, to being a series of activities
which the church defines, shapes, and carries out, often “out there”
somewhere. Further, the effect of the Great Commission in sustaining an urge to colonize other countries and “civilizing” other peoples
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11
and conquering other religions in the name of mission cannot be minimized either. As a corrective, it is important to recover the understanding of mission seen in Acts 1:8, in which the risen Jesus promises
his disciples that they “will receive power when the Holy Spirit has
come” upon them, so that they may be his witnesses “to the ends of
the earth.” Here mission is primarily a fulfillment of a promise, a gift
of grace, and a spontaneous outcome of receiving the Spirit. When
the Spirit comes upon us, we cannot but follow, stepping behind the
Spirit who always goes ahead. Intentionally opting for Acts 1:8 as the
foundation of the understanding of the missionary calling of Christians is critical at this time.8 It highlights that the church’s mission is
only a response, and primarily a witness shaped by first discerning the
Spirit who is already at work. Further, mission of the church is a way
of being in the Spirit; it is first and foremost a posture of being, a style
of life, before it is expressed in specific and contextual responses.
Concrete missional actions arise out of our being in mission, being in
a permanent openness to God and in God to the other, and to the
world. Therefore, all that the church is and does has a missionary dimension to it. An unmissionary church is not the church. The body
not broken for the life of the world is not the body of Christ.
In a missional response shaped by an attentive following of the
Spirit who goes ahead of us, there is always room for surprises. Mission takes place in unheard of places and through the agencies of unexpected people. As the Spirit moves afresh in changing contexts,
there is little room for fixed order and set strategies; things are turned
upside down. Philip, the evangelist who was preaching successfully to
a large crowd in the midst of a city, is suddenly led away along a desert
road to meet a lonely individual (Acts 8). A reluctant Peter is sent to a
God-fearing gentile. Peter learns, to his surprise, that the Spirit acts
in totally unheard of ways for which Peter and the Jewish Christians
were in no way prepared. Without a radical insistence upon the priority of attuned discerning of God’s already up-and-running presence
and work in the world, there can be no transformation from a churchshaped mission to a mission-shaped church.
Secondly, as Craig Van Gelder argues, that vast majority of the
congregation exhibit “at the core of their genetic code . . . an organizational self-understanding, where the church’s primary identity is
8 My extended comments on this shift may be found in “CWM’s First Decade and
Beyond,” International Review of Mission 76 (October 1987): 477–479.
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related to being responsible to accomplish something.”9 One of the
signs of such a captivity of the church to the “corporate mindset” is
the deep sense of “agenda-anxiety” that characterizes many mission
committees of larger parishes that have an acute sense of obligation to
do something, somewhere, to someone. It is worth noting that even
the definitions of the five “Marks of Mission” of the Anglican Communion are formulated as a list of “to-do” things.10 Despite the rich
sacramental life of the church, there is no reference to mission as a
habitus, a way of being, conformed by the Spirit to Christ’s way. The
greater the number of programs that a congregation runs in its neighborhood or elsewhere, the more successful it considers itself to be.
Not that programs are irrelevant, but the problem is that these projects shaped by a few enthusiasts have little or no impact upon the core
of being of the church, or all that goes on in the church, including its
worship or Christian nurture, for example.
Even oft-repeated and unthinking expressions like “building the
kingdom,” or “extending the kingdom” are not biblical, and more importantly, as George Hunsberger reminds us, they betray “an imperial
or even a triumphalistic approach” to mission. He notes that “in the
Gospels, the most repeated and emphatic verbs directing our response to the reign of God are ‘to receive’ and ‘to enter.’ They come
at times intertwined. . . . These two verbs represent two image clusters that, taken together, provide a portrait of the identity of a Christian community and the nature of its mission.”11
According to Luke’s gospel, when the seventy returned from
their first missionary adventure and joyfully reported their successes,
Jesus’ response was, “Nevertheless, do not rejoice at this, that spirits
submit to you, but rejoice that your names are written in heaven”
(10:20). It is this central vision of the priority of the reign of God
breaking in and God’s invitation to participate in that missio Dei that
gives rise to a mission-shaped church.
My third observation has to do with the concept of the missio Dei
itself. Text after text on mission—ever since the Willingen meeting of
the International Missionary Council in 1952—has articulated a
9 Craig Van Gelder, “From Corporate Church to Missional Church: The Challenge Facing Congregations Today,” Review and Expositor 101 (Summer 2004): 426.
10 Cited by Hiltz, “Go to the World!,” 309.
11 George R. Hunsberger, “Is There a Biblical Warrant for Evangelism?,” quoted
in D. Preman Niles, From East and West: Rethinking Christian Mission (St. Louis,
Mo.: Chalice Press, 2004), 117–118.
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number of diverse interpretations of the concept itself and called for
new forms and practices of the church’s responsive mission. To a large
extent, they have been successful in redirecting mission thinking.
Some have referred to this change in thinking as the Copernican revolution in mission reflection and practice, since it shifts the agency in
mission from the church to God. However, the new emphasis on the
missio Dei has its own limitations due to the very different and at
times contradicting interpretations of its theological basis, content,
and import.12 An extended study of these diverse interpretations
along with their promise and limitations, though fruitful, is beyond
the scope of this essay.
Having observed mission practice in a large number of churches
around the world from my vantage point at the World Council of
Churches, I suspect that the concept of the missio Dei in itself might
not be adequate for the transformation of churches into “missionshaped.” Though I am sensitive to the dangers of oversimplifying
highly complex and lengthy discussions over the years, I would like to
highlight four issues that have been critical since 1952.
First, the theological basis for the concept has been founded on
an interpretation of the inner Trinitarian life of mutual sending within
the Godhead. Apart from the depth of the theological vision behind it
which needs to be safeguarded, it has been too abstract, and each interpreter was able to go his/her own way with it. Part of the problem
in these articulations of the Trinitarian basis is that they laid an emphasis upon the sending of the Son by the Father without an equal
emphasis upon the role of the Spirit. The power of the Trinitarian
interpretation can be preserved only when mission is elucidated in
the light of the “whole gracious movement of God toward fellowship
with the creatures.”13
Second, the content of the missio Dei, in many interpretations,
has been identified with the salvation history centered again exclusively in the work of Christ, with the effect that the doctrine of salvation—and consequently mission—came to be divorced from creation;
the latter only provides the canvas, the stage, for the former to take
place. Hence mission in many quarters is reduced to the “conversion”
12
See Richebacher, “Missio Dei.”
Douglas John Hall, Professing the Faith: Christian Theology in a North American Context (Minneapolis, Minn.: Fortress Press, 1993), 16.
13
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of those who are outside the church, which has led to a neglect of
God’s activity in creation.
Third, even if mission was said to be first and foremost of God, it
was held that the church is the sole agent of it. All these interpretations have led to various forms of exclusivism. Finally, the more influential interpretations during the 1960s and 1970s understood missio
Dei so broadly, often with little or no reference to the being of the
church, that that era has been charged with the criticism that “if everything is mission, then nothing is mission.”
Konrad Raiser, an astute reader of the history of ecumenical
thought, has this to say:
To be sure, in both [Willingen and Lund] there was the intention
to root mission and unity in God’s Trinitarian action, but in fact
the christocentric orientation of the ecumenical discussion gained
the upper hand. As a consequence, both mission and unity were
inscribed into the framework of a theology of history which covered up the ambiguities of all historical processes. A christocentric theology of mission inevitably tends to become exclusive and
unable to respond to the challenge of dialogue with other religions. A christocentric theology of the church and its unity is always in danger of developing a “triumphalist” conception of the
church as the continuation of the incarnation of Jesus Christ, thus
considering the church as the exclusive mediator of salvation.14
In short, in spite of the original intention of Willingen, the concept of
missio Dei came to be used to endorse what I have called only a
“church-shaped mission.”
A little later Raiser persuasively points to the need for challenging
and complementing “a theology of mission which focuses on God’s incarnation in Christ” by an “emphasis on the other dimension of God’s
mission, the sending of the Spirit” (as I have suggested above, pointing
to Acts 1:8 rather than Matthew 28:19 as offering a wider horizon).
Within such a horizon, Raiser suggests that a missionary church
need not be afraid of syncretism in the dialogue with people of
other faiths nor of being co-opted into cooperation with social and
political movements which struggle for liberation. Similarly, it
need not fear the situation of the small minority nor shy away in
14 Konrad Raiser, “‘That the World May Believe’: The Missionary Vocation as the
Necessary Horizon for Ecumenism,” International Review of Mission 88, no. 350
(July 1999): 192.
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15
the face of conflicts whenever its witness meets with open rejection or persecution. God shapes and maintains the oikoumene, the
household of the inhabited earth, through the power of the Holy
Spirit who works and calls forth witnesses even outside the limits
of the visible church.15
Therefore, what is needed is a larger and more inclusive framework,
though necessarily building upon the rich missiological heritage
around it.
How, then, do we move forward to a re-visioning of theology,
ecclesiology, and leadership in the church which can facilitate the
birthing of mission-shaped churches and build up leadership, shaped
by a vision of the priority of God’s already up-and-running mission in
the world?
An Asian Excursus: Some Clues
In the search for such a wider framework, I would like to identify
some significant contributions on mission from several ecumenically
minded Asian Christian theologians who over the past six decades
have offered helpful directions and insights for a re-visioning of mission in a different key.16 Christians in Asia have not been direct inheritors of the long history of either the western mission practice or
the theologies that motivated and justified them. In fact, the colonial
experience that shaped many of the Asian countries has instilled in
them a sniff of suspicion in their reading of much of the theologies
that sustained missionary activities from the West. Resistance to colonialism and participation in movements for independence or sociocultural liberation in their respective countries gave many of them
the impetus to undertake their theological/missiological reflections in
alternative ways from the norms in the West. Their insights, I am
15
Raiser, “‘That the World May Believe,’” 193.
See Wati Longchar, Josef P. Widyatmadja, and M. P. Joseph, eds., They Left
by Another Road: Rerouting Mission and Ecumenism in Asia (Chiangmai, Thailand:
Christian Conference of Asia, 2007); Niles, From East and West; Ken Christoph
Miyamoto, God’s Mission in Asia (Eugene, Ore.: Pickwick Publications, 2007); Lalsangkima Pachuau, ed., Ecumenical Missiology: Contemporary Trends, Issues and
Themes (Bangalore, India: United Theological College, 2002); Choan Seng Song,
Christian Mission in Reconstruction: An Asian Analysis (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis
Books, 1977); and M. M. Thomas, Salvation and Humanization: Some Critical Issues in the Theology of Mission in Contemporary India (Madras, India: Christian
Literature Society, 1971). Another significant collection of provocative reflections is
G. V. Job, et al., Rethinking Christianity in India (Madras, India: Christian Literature
Society, 1938).
16
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convinced, can help us move away from the narrow interpretation of
the concept of the missio Dei and the concomitant ecclesio-centrism
that have characterized much of the missiological thinking and practice in the West, and may provide clues in our search for the much
needed broader framework.
First, while many Asian theologians, myself included, are deeply
committed to the renewal of the church in and for mission, they do
not begin with the church in their missional reflections but rather
with the world and the people in whom God is lovingly active. Many
of them would heartily agree with the statement, “Start with the
church and the mission will probably be lost. Start with mission and it
is likely that the church will be found.”17
Therefore, the starting point for several Asian ecumenical theologies is an intentional focus upon the cataclysmic historical events that
have been forcefully breaking all around us in Asia, particularly since
the turn of the twentieth century. These provide the raw data for missiological reflections. Theological questions about God and the world
are posed not a priori (for example, the doctrine of the inner Trinitarian dynamics), nor from a “master” definition of either the Christ or
the church. Rather, theological reflection takes place with an astute
attention to context and current events, with theologians entering
into an active dialogue with the religio-cultural and theological heritage—both Christian and indigenous—through which disclosure of
the Divine presence is discerned. In Asian theology, as the Taiwanese
theologian C. S. Song puts it, “Context and revelation are forever in
confluence. Revelation runs into context and context runs into revelation. . . . We need only to keep our ears and eyes open to perceive
deeper meaning in the hubbub of the busy crossroads of context and
revelation.”18 Therefore, an unshakable confidence in the “raw sovereignty” of God and God’s creative presence in Asia from time immemorial undergirds much of theological reflection in Asia.
Second, theologians in Asia work within the conviction that God
has been present and active in the revolutionary changes taking place
in Asia. The Korean theologian Hyun Younghak puts it forcefully: “I
do not believe in an invalid God who was carried piggy-back to Korea
by some missionary. God was already active in history long before the
17
Mission-Shaped Church, 124.
C. S. Song, Tell Us Our Names: Story Theology from an Asian Perspective
(Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 1984), 40.
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missionaries came.”19 Others speak of the God of their foremothers
and forefathers encountering them in various ways and accompanying
them in their history and in their religio-cultural tradition, both in
judgment and grace. Therefore a major missiological task was seen as
the discernment of the movement of God’s Spirit in the events of our
time.20 For example, Paul Devanandan of India has described the task
of mission in India as helping others “discern in such renewal the inner working of the Spirit of God, guiding men of other faiths than
ourselves. . . . If all ‘new creation’ can only be of God where else could
these ‘new’ aspects of other beliefs in the thinking and living of people
have sprung from?”21 However, this insistence upon the direct relationship between God’s acts and historical events is not an uncritical
acceptance of the present or every new development, for God’s relationship to the world is acknowledged as being in grace and judgment,
creative and critical, dismantling and redemptive. In dialogue with
both the prophetic tradition in the Bible and ecumenical partners
from other parts of Asia and beyond, these Asian thinkers have consistently critiqued socio-cultural movements in Asia and Christian participation in them.
Third, the conviction about God’s movement in the history of all
peoples—in judgment and grace—leads many Asian theologians to
critique a narrow understanding of salvation history which identifies
God’s saving presence only within the history of Israel and later in that
of the church. Since they affirm that the reign of God is the sovereign
and inclusive movement of God in the processes of creation as a
whole, God’s mission therefore cannot be exhausted by the Christian
story. They view the histories and cultures of all peoples as intrinsically related to God’s creative purpose and act, though the creaturely
response is often ambiguous and always under God’s judgment and
transforming grace. Therefore the entire world is placed under God’s
creative and redemptive activity and God has been active directly
among all peoples and in their histories.
19
Quoted in Niles, From East and West, 53.
This trend may be identified as early as in 1957. See The Common Evangelistic
Task of the Churches in East Asia: Papers and Minutes of the East Asia Christian
Conference, Prapat, Indonesia, March 17–26, 1957.
21 Paul David Devanandan, “The Younger Churches Look Ahead,” in Preparation
for Dialogue: A Collection of Essays on Hinduism and Christianity in New India, ed.
Nalini Devanandan and M. M. Thomas (Bangalore, India: Christian Institute for the
Study of Religion and Society, 1964), 177.
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Fourth, as a consequence of the above affirmations, many Asian
theologians insist that the starting point for God’s mission is not the
church but rather God’s creation. They resolutely refuse to separate
creation and redemption as two separate acts of God; rather, creation
and redemption are seen as two interactive moments in a single continuum of God’s relationship to the world. As C. S. Song argues in
Christian Mission in Reconstruction, “When salvation gets divorced
from creation, it is bound to lose its universal dimension and significance. This leads inevitably to the impoverishment of Christian understanding of history and culture [and, we may add, “mission”] and
has proved to be detrimental to the wholesome appreciation of Asian
history and culture in God’s revelation.”22 In the same vein, a Sri
Lankan theologian, Wesley Ariarajah, says, “An undeveloped theology
of creation lies at the heart of the Protestant inability to deal with
plurality. Today there is a new interest in creation, but it is more in
relation to the natural environment than about the peoples who fill
the earth.”23 I believe that here is an unmistakable clue to the sort of
widening of the horizon for a re-visioning of theology and church that
we seek and that will consequently lead to a rethinking of mission.
Of course, at this point a question might be raised regarding the
role that the perceived special relation of God to Israel and, analogously, the unique role of the church in mission play within the
broader framework of Asian theologies. C. S. Song addresses these
questions in his extensive reflections on this theme, stating, “I must
repeat that Israel is chosen not to present herself to the rest of the
world as a nation through which God’s redeeming love will be mediated, but to be a symbol . . . of how God is also at work among nations
in a redemptive way.”24 The church is not the end but only a sign of
God’s purpose for all of creation and its mission is to bring to focus
what God is doing with all peoples. That which is called to be a pointer
to God’s accompaniment with all should not be turned into the point
itself; it is idolatrous. That which is called to be the leaven cannot seek
to turn the whole bread into a leaven lump.
22 Song, Christian Mission in Reconstruction, as quoted in Niles, From East and
West, 140, with Preman Niles’s own addition in brackets.
23 Wesley Ariarajah, Not Without My Neighbour: Issues in Interfaith Relations
(Geneva: WCC Publications, 1999), 115.
24 C. S. Song, “From Israel to Asia: A Theological Leap,” Ecumenical Review 28
(July 1976): 258.
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19
Finally, within the larger horizon of a single creation-redemption
continuum, how are we to understand God’s decisive presence in Jesus Christ? The Christ event is not an intrusion but a nodal point
within God’s creative-redemptive movement in creation. But within
this process of God’s movement in creation, as P. Chenchiah, an Indian lay theologian, states, the birth of Christ is “the birth of a new
order in creation.” Jesus is “an outburst or inrush into history, . . . a
new creative effort of God in which the cosmic energy or sakti is the
Holy Spirit, the new creation is Christ, and the new life order is the
Kingdom of God.”25 He continues, “True evangelism consists in reproducing Jesus. The Indian Christian should harness the Holy Spirit
to the creation of new life.”26 Or as another Indian theologian puts it:
“God’s act of redemption in Christ Jesus concerns the whole of his
creation. Biblical faith repeatedly affirms that the work of Christ is of
cosmic significance in that redemption wrought in Him has affected
the entire creative process.”27
In the same vein, C. S. Song speaks of redemption as “God’s revolution within his own creation” which brings about “radical interruptions and qualitative changes in the life and history of humankind”28
and creation as a whole. Within such a creation-redemption continuum, Asian theologians find redemption as “the way God intermittently rebuffs the human effort to maintain identity and continuity
through institutionalizing the experience of God’s free grace into [exclusive, I may add] religious establishments.”29
In the light of these Asian reflections on mission and theology, I
believe that it is possible to go beyond the traditional interpretation of
the concept of the missio Dei, and avoid some of the pitfalls mentioned above. The significant clues, identified above, open up an alternative framework around which our mission reflections can be
construed.
25
139.
P. Chenchiah, “Rethinking Christianity,” quoted in Niles, From East and West,
26 Quoted in Robin H. Boyd, An Introduction to Indian Christian Theology (Madras, India: Christian Literature Society, 1969), 153.
27 Paul D. Devanandan, Our Task Today: Revision of Evangelistic Concern (Bangalore, India: Christian Institute for the Study of Religion and Society, 1958), 5.
28 Song, “From Israel to Asia,” 254.
29 Miyamoto, God’s Mission in Asia, 174. Words in brackets are mine.
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Concursus Dei: A Possible New Horizon for Mission
I submit that such a wider framework may be found in the medieval concept of concursus Dei (understood here as divine accompaniment), when reframed to express God’s presence and “walking with”
all of creation, calling and leading creation into ever new life even in
the midst of the persistent creaturely resistance. I am aware of the
complex discussions in history, including the work of Karl Barth,
around the notion of concursus Dei, primarily to address the nature of
the creaturely co-causality and God’s sovereign freedom in relation to
the traditional doctrine of “providence.” Yet, I believe that the term
can stand for God’s everlasting creative-redemptive activity, God’s
walking with creation, thus leading creation toward God’s own selfsurpassing fullness. A reconstruction of the vision of concursus Dei
will provide us with a pregnant motif for re-framing the shape of the
church’s responsive mission. It also can broaden our understanding of
the nature of the relationship between God and the world and enrich
our reformulation of the nature of the church within that relation. For
at the base of concursus Dei is a vision of God’s unceasing accompaniment with creation, calling and evoking its participation in Godmovement as God leads it patiently and persuasively, both in judgment and grace, to its future in God’s future.
In fact, one can argue that concursus Dei is a meaningful way to
describe what much of the biblical story is all about. As Walter
Brueggemann puts it:
This is the presupposition for everything that follows in the Bible.
It is the deepest premise from which good news is possible. God
and his creation are bound together by the powerful, gracious
movement of God towards that creation. . . . The connection cannot be nullified. . . . God “calls the worlds into being.” . . . Every
part and moment of this creation is like the freshness of the
morning.30
Commenting on God’s call to the deep to “let the waters bring forth”
and its response, Catherine Keller suggests, “Creation takes place as
invitation and cooperation.”31 She also cites approvingly a statement
30 Walter Brueggemann, Genesis, Interpretation, A Bible Commentary for Teaching and Preaching (Atlanta, Ga.: John Knox Press, 1982), 22, 24.
31 Catherine Keller, The Face of the Deep: A Theology of Becoming (New York:
Routledge, 2003), 195.
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by Womanist theologian Karen Baker-Fletcher: “According to Genesis, then, the deep, the darkness, the waters dance in cocreative activity with God.”32
The story of Jesus Christ provides us the classic instance of this
“cocreative activity with God,” the dramatic concretization in history
and manifestation of the power of the concursus of God with creation.
It was in Christ’s incarnation that God is confessed as Emmanuel, the
Concursus Dei, God With Us. In this view, then, incarnation is not an
intrusion but the concretion into “human flesh” of the divine concursus. Through the Spirit of the risen Christ, who is the firstborn of many
sisters and brothers, the Christic gestalt is now available for all (Romans 8:28–29). In him we discern the sort of transparency to the divine
accompaniment that God seeks to evoke in creation. Jesus of Nazareth
is God’s sovereign movement toward humans, and around him a responsive social movement of love-in-action gathers momentum, particularly from among those who were at the margins. The church is one
manifestation of such a movement within God-movement, reflecting
the sovereign accompaniment of God with creation. It is interesting to
note that Clarence Jordon, in his attempt to paraphrase the synoptic
gospels in Cotton Patch idiom around 1940, renders the term “kingdom of God” consistently as the “God movement”!
God accompanies us by calling and eliciting from us a cooperative response to the new and alternative possibilities according to
God’s purpose. When our responses are distorted or in the negative,
God, in judgment and grace, experiences our failures in God’s very
self and bears their consequences. Thus resisting all that is against
God’s purpose, God time and again calls and persuades us to “cowalk” with God, offering us appropriately new and alternative possibilities. Through it all, God patiently and everlastingly leads humans
and the creation to their God-intended wholeness. In a sense, concursus Dei points to a vision of God’s activity not as one “of unidirectional
power acting on the world from outside” but rather “as calling forth a
self-creating creation and giving it space for its own becoming.”33 The
life, death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth and the continued
activity of the Spirit of the risen Christ—all are historical demonstration of the presence, power, and pattern of this divine accompaniment. Thus the gospel story is the story of how God’s story and the
32
Quoted in Keller, Face of the Deep, 240.
Anna Case-Winters, Reconstructing a Christian Theology of Nature (Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2007), 134.
33
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story of creation are always irrevocably tied together by God’s concursus. The church is called to be the firstfruits and the foretaste of the
new creation into which God lures and leads the whole of creation.
While we know that in Christ we have been called and are being
drawn into the God-movement, we also know that we cannot set limits to the gracious and universal accompaniment of God in unexpected
and different ways among different peoples, cultures, and religions,
and in all of creation. As a sign of God’s new creation, the church’s
calling is to live, celebrate, and witness to the concursus Dei by mirroring the divine accompaniment through its own solidarity and compassion with all. Such accompaniment with God, and in God with
others, also involves attentive, dialogical listening to other stories,
thus mutually enriching each other. God invites the church to stand
with God against all that works against the divine purpose, such as
forces of domination, exclusion, and death, in our time. The calling of
the church is to be caught up in God’s invitation to enter into “the
total sweep of the Good News [which] envelops God’s entire cre­
ation,”34 bringing about order out of chaos. Such a church is missionshaped, since its shape and actions are the consequence of its being
caught up in God’s walking with the creation.
The Contours of a Concursus Dei-centric Ecclesiology
Before we turn to some of the characteristics of a concursus Deicentric ecclesiology, it may be good simply to note in passing that
such an ecclesiology is very different from other ecclesiologies, such
as the one shaped by the dominant theological axis, centered around
the “creation-fall-redemption” matrix. In the latter, the emphasis is
upon a christocentric exclusivism which envisages that the church
is the only locus of salvation. The purpose of its mission, therefore, is
the conversion of those who are outside it and to that end it plants
churches everywhere so that the “benefits of Christ’s passion” may be
dispensed.
In a concursus Dei-centric ecclesiology, on the other hand, the
One who accompanies is always a step ahead, opening up for creatures spaces for “the indwelling of the unbounded fullness of the divine life.”35 But such an openness to God’s offering also opens them
34 Paul Devanandan, Christian Concern in Hindhuism (Bangalore, India: CISRS,
1961), 119.
35 Jürgen Moltmann, God in Creation. A New Theology of Creation and the Spirit
of God (San Francisco. Calif.: Harper & Row, 1985), 213.
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23
for communion among themselves, thus allowing them to cocreate
each other in the midst of forces of fragmentation and destruction.
By this process, the creatures cooperate with God in increasing the
experience of and creaturely response to the forcefield of the Godmovement, the reign of God. Mission in this sense is essentially the
“increase of the love of God and love of fellow-creatures.”36
A powerful image of Karl Barth portrays God as a bird in flight
and not a “caged bird.” This image reminds us rightly that the divine
concursus is dynamic and ever fresh, and therefore the creatures are
called to focus on remaining radically open to the presence and call of
God and its surprising offer of alternative possibilities. It calls the
mission-shaped church to be dialogically open to the world wherein it
might discern the hitherto unheard of shapes of divine accompaniment. The religious experiences of people of other living faiths are
one such situation. While Christians are called to point in faith and
with confidence to the way in which the divine accompaniment has
been embodied uniquely in Jesus Christ, because of the universality
of the concursus Dei in creation we are called to acknowledge that we
cannot set limits to the gracious movement of God’s love among other
people and in other traditions. Such a reality calls for an active dialogue with people of other faiths and cultures. Therefore, a missionshaped church lives in the tension37 between confident witness and
dialogical openness to God’s redemptive ways with humans and creation. We are called to openness, that the Spirit may lead us into hitherto unknown truths. Mission in such a context is not to make a person who belongs to another faith an object of our converting, but to
walk with (concursus) him/her as a fellow pilgrim. As fellow pilgrims,
our story of God’s movement in Christ is shared and the invitation to
experience its reality and power is given, yet with a readiness to hear
the other’s story of God-movement and to be deepened by it.
Concursus Dei calls a mission-shaped church to undertake all its
internal functions, such as kerygma, worship, koinonia, service, and
nurture, as expressions of and responses to the divine movement in
the world. In this sense, baptism is primarily an event, as it was with
the baptism of Christ, “a solidarity plunge” in the waters of Jordon
that flow through our neighborhoods today; that is, a commitment to
36 H. Richard Niebuhr, in collaboration with Daniel Day Williams and James M.
Gustafson, The Purpose of the Church and its Ministry (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1957), 27–39.
37 See Fred Wilson, ed., The San Antonio Report (Geneva: WCC, 1990), 33. See
the report on Section I, esp. I.IV.
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walk in solidarity and compassion with others, sharing their hopes and
tears, joy and pain. As such, baptism is fundamentally a missional act,
an act of stepping out with Christ for a life for others. Similarly, every
celebration of the Eucharist is an acknowledgment of both the sacramental accompaniment of the Divine in all of nature and a proclamation of the costliness of God’s walking with creation in love, as manifested in the self-pouring of the body and blood by Christ on the
cross. As the word “Mass” implies, the Eucharist is also a sending of
the mission-shaped church so that it is broken for the life of the world
in remembrance of Christ.
The everlasting and unfinalizable concursus Dei in creation manifests itself in diverse ways appropriate to diverse contexts. It is, in the
words of the letter to the Ephesians, the “multicolored” wisdom of
God in its rich diversity to which the church is called to witness (3:10).
Therefore, Christian mission by nature is multilayered and its witness
is rich in its contextual variety. It can never be monolithic or monological or fixed. A mission-shaped church knows that God’s dynamic
movement in the world will not allow us to reduce the good news to a
neat, flattened, and “once-for-all-the-same” story. The fullness of the
truth of the gospel will be revealed in all its splendor only as its manifold expressions are released in more and more peoples and cultures,
as they are brought together in dialogue.
Through the life of Jesus of Nazareth, we know that the natural
habitat of the God-movement is always among the poor and dispossessed. A mission-shaped church knows and is ready to sit at the margins of society. Therefore, it is not afraid of being a “minority” church;
nor is it afraid that due to its prophetic witness it will be hated by others, both within and without the church. A concursus Dei-centered
church may boldly walk with those who have been rejected, even if
embracing them leads to their own exclusion from circles of power
and privilege, as the churches in recent times have experienced. Besides, triumphalism and head-counting has no place within a missionshaped church. As a provocative statement within the World Council
of Churches in the 1960s suggested, the goal of mission is not a
“world-embracing church” but rather a “world-embracing shalom.”
God’s accompaniment is never a passive one; rather, God calls,
cajoles, persuades, and disturbs until there is a creaturely response to
accompany in faith the One who calls. As it has been said above, God
accompanies in both judgment and grace, dismantling creaturely
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resistance and willful refusal and strengthening feeble response. The
following powerful words of Archbishop Desmond Tutu are applicable to the sort of divine accompaniment that we are considering.
There is a movement not easily discernable, at the heart of things
to reverse the awful centrifugal forces of alienation, brokenness,
diversion, hostility, and disharmony. God has set in motion a centripetal process, a moving toward the center, toward unity, harmony, goodness, peace and justice that removes barriers. Jesus
says “And when I am lifted up from the earth I shall draw everyone to myself” as he hangs from his cross with outflung arms,
thrown out to embrace all, everyone and everything, in cosmic
embrace, so that all, everyone, everything, belongs. None is an
outsider, all are insiders, all belong. There are no aliens; all belong
in one family, God’s family, and the human family.38
These words sum up in no uncertain terms both the nature of the
concursus Dei—its inclusivity, its judgment—and its power of resistance to all that opposes the divine purpose, the vulnerable and cruciform way of Jesus of Nazareth. A mission-shaped church will be conformed to the image of Christ both in its missionary posture and
practice.
Leadership in a Mission-Shaped Church
Let me now make a few brief comments regarding the hallmarks
of those who are called to the task of enabling a mission-shaped and
concursus Dei-centric church to grow.
Concursus Dei, first and foremost, stands for the sacramental accompaniment of God in all of creation and in the history of all peoples. A chief hallmark of a leader in a mission-shaped congregation is
a profound sense of the divine accompaniment in creation and among
humans and in one’s life. In this context, the broad description of
a “priest”—not just the ordained clergy, but all priestly people—by
L. William Countryman is pertinent to consider the quality of such a
leader. He says, “By ‘priest’ I mean any person who lives in the dangerous, exhilarating, life-giving borderlands of human existence,
where everyday experience of life opens up to reveal glimpses of the
38
Desmond Tutu, No Future without Forgiveness (London: Rider, 1999), 213.
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HOLY—and not only lives there but comes to the aid of others who
are living there.”39
In many ways these words sum up much of what it means to be a
leader in a mission-shaped church. The leader is one who has learned
to discern the God-movement by being really present and sharing in
the “dangerous and exhilarating borderlands” of our context today. In
other words, the leader is one who has learned to sit where people sit,
just as the prophet Ezekiel sat where the exiles sat and wept with
them for seven days and seven nights (Ezekiel 3:15). The formation
of Jeremiah or even Jesus of Nazareth was no different: in the midst
of the ordinary, they were able to see the glimpses of the Holy, the
accompanying presence of the Divine.
A leader in a mission-shaped church needs to be constantly attuned to the Spirit who goes ahead of the church in mission, rather
than relying on precooked strategies and projects; at the same time,
he/she also needs to seek the prophetic gift of the Spirit “to nurture,
nourish, and evoke a consciousness and perception alternative to the
consciousness and perception of the dominant culture.”40 Becoming a
leader is to be endowed with a social imagination that not only critiques the dominant values of our context but also points to the alternative into which God calls us to walk with Godself. This implies that
the processes of formation must include an ability to be conversant
with the social sciences and cultural studies.
A concursus Dei-shaped church seeks to overcome all forms of
dualisms between the sacred and secular so that it can witness to the
accompanying God in all aspects of life. It implies that a leader in
such a church is one who is committed to keep borders porous so
that they may be crossed, and where they are oppressive they may be
transgressed.
But such a border-crossing across cultures, religions, gender,
race, and sexual orientation, however threatening the experience may
be, demands dialogical skills across difference. Such ability for intercontextual conversation is critical in these days as our world is threatened by violence against anything different from oneself. It is critical
that the leaders in a mission-shaped church acquire the skills for
39 L. William Countryman, Living On the Border of the Holy: Renewing the Priesthood of All (Harrisburg, Pa.: Morehouse Publishing, 1999), 3.
40 Walter Brueggemann, Prophetic Imagination (Minneapolis, Minn.: Fortress
Press, 1978), 13.
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27
listening to and internalizing multiple stories, particularly the stories
of those who have been hitherto marginalized or silenced. It is through
such dialogical listening that we learn to create space in ourselves in
order to receive the other. Concursus Dei seeks to break through the
self-enclosed worlds we live in and to build persons shaped across our
differences, those whom Miroslav Volf calls “catholic” personalities:
“A catholic personality is a personality enriched by otherness, a personality which is what it is only because multiple others have been
reflected in it in a particular way.”41
An essential requirement for adequate leadership formation—
whether lay or ordained—to occur is that our institutions and processes of formation must understand theological education not as an
end in itself, but as serving the mission of God in the world. Unless
the theological discipline itself is understood as a study of the concursus Dei, and unless mission becomes the overarching vision and the
organizing principle of all formative processes, our efforts in theological education will continue to be inadequate for leadership formation
in a mission-shaped church.42
However, as one who has been teaching an introductory course
on Christian theology for over twenty-five years, to my dismay I have
found that our most familiar major texts on Christian doctrines have
very little to say about the mission of God or the responsive mission of
the church.43 I think the assumption, in all probability, is that mission
is not necessarily a topic within the loci of major Christian doctrines.
Since it is part of practical theology, either in the special field of
missiology or in courses on the ministry of the church, one might be
41 Miroslav Volf, Exclusion and Embrace: A Theological Exploration of Identity,
Otherness, and Reconciliation (Nashville, Tenn.: Abingdon Press, 1996), 51.
42 For some time I have argued extensively for such a reshaping of theological education and curriculum. See my “Ministerial Formation for Mission: Implications for
Theological Education,” International Review of Mission 81 (January 1992): 33–45.
43 See any of the following: Alister E. McGrath, Christian Theology: An Introduction (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2008); William C. Placher, Essentials of Christian
Theology (Louisville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox Press, 2003); Daniel L. Migliore,
Faith Seeking Understanding: An Introduction to Christian Theology (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1991); Owen C. Thomas and Ellen K. Wondra, Introduction to Theology, third edition (Harrisburg, Pa.: Morehouse Publishing, 2002); Ian
S. Markham, Understanding Christian Doctrine (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2008).
However, as an exception, see Serene Jones and Paul Lakeland, eds., Constructive
Theology: A Contemporary Approach to Classic Themes (Minneapolis, Minn.: Fortress, 2005). It refreshingly has a section on mission (see especially pp. 230–238),
though even this is tucked in at the very end of a long section on the church.
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taught how to define, plan, shape, and manage “missions.” I also think
that such an absence of any discussion on mission is due to a truncated understanding of the nature, notes, and functions of the church
that has little reference to its central calling to be “apostolic,” sent out
as the body of Christ, broken for the life of the world. Doctrines,
when divorced from the world that God so loves, are inauthentic expressions of a God whose concursus with creation is central to God’s
being. Reference to mission cannot be a small appendage to the doctrine of the church. As George Carey, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, is reported to have said, “Ecclesiology is a subsection of the
doctrine of mission”44 and not the other way around.
Therefore, it is pertinent that any formative process of missional
leadership takes seriously what a seasoned theological educator,
David J. Bosch, says in his Transforming Mission: “Just as the church
ceases to be church if it is not missionary, theology ceases to be theology if it loses its missionary character. The crucial question, then, is
. . . what theology is and is about. We are in need of a missiological
agenda for theology rather than just a theological agenda for mission;
for theology, rightly understood, has no reason to exist other than critically to accompany the missio Dei.”45
When theologies and theological formative processes critically
accompany the concursus Dei, God’s people in local congregations
will be transformed into mission-shaped co-workers with God, and
the eschatological movement of God’s drawing all things into God’s
embrace in a renewed creation and a reconciled new humanity will
march on. The concursus Dei will indeed be the gloria Dei.
44 Quoted in John Hull, Mission Shaped Church: A Theological Response (London: SCM Press, 2006), 1.
45 David J. Bosch, Transforming Mission: Paradigm Shifts in Theology of Mission
(Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 1991), 494.